


Always

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternate Ending, Angst, Destroy Ending, F/M, Gen, Happy Ending, Mass Effect Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-23 11:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is over, but the Normandy is a goddamn mess. So is Garrus. </p><p>Eventually, they'll both be whole again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

The Normandy is a goddamn mess.

 

EDI is offline. Her body is...vacated, an empty shell occupying the co-pilot’s seat, and the AI core processors aren’t responding to anything that Adams has tried so far.

 

The ship made a hard landing, in no small part due to EDI's sudden and complete shut-down, and though it hasn't taken catastrophic damage, it's still going to be a while before they're spaceworthy again. It doesn't help that they've been largely  cut off from the rest of the Sword fleet – the QEC is on the fritz, and even with Traynor working non-stop to clear things up it's still difficult to get messages in and out.

 

The last message from Hackett had been clear enough, though - they had _won._

 

They had known that Shepard made it to the Citadel. Garrus didn't know how or why, but she _did._ There was no way of knowing what exactly had happened once she got there, but whatever it was had gotten the Crucible armed and ready to fire.

 

And then there was no time. No way of knowing where on the Citadel Shepard was at. She didn't respond over the comms – not even to Hackett, who had personally taken to the channel to plead for her location, so an extraction could at least be attempted.

 

But there was nothing to go on, and no way of knowing how far would be far enough away from the Crucible, once it fired.  That’s what Joker tells him, at least. It’s a good thing Garrus had been unconscious at the time – damn blood loss – because he’s not sure that even Vega’s ridiculous amount of strength could have kept him away from the Citadel then.

 

Now they're on a garden planet somewhere just outside of the Sol system. Garrus doesn’t care enough to find out exactly where. And Shepard –

 

_No matter what happens here…you know I love you._

_Always will._

 

Shepard is dead.

 

Hackett’s last message had been short but sweet – the Crucible had been fired, and the Reapers destroyed. 

 

The Citadel, however, was in pieces. Reports from Sword ships leaving Earth space to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet reported explosions and high-energy discharges from multiple points on the station. Estimated survivor counts were astronomically low, if the possibility of survivors was entertained at all.

 

Garrus doesn’t want to give up. But it’s hard to hope, too.

 

When he tries to sleep, he sees her – face streaked with blood, back-lit by the eerie blue glow of the Citadel beam, breathing hard as she tells him not to argue, to _go_ , to leave her behind.

 

And he doesn’t want to, but he’s losing blood and Tali is barely managing to hold him up and Shepard is looking at him like she just _knows_ – knows that this is goodbye, that it’s the end, that when she turns around and runs at that beam it’ll be the last thing she ever does.

 

He can’t shake the feeling that she might have been right.

 

His omni-tool pings – it’s Joker, calling from the bridge. _“Hey, Garrus.”_ He sounds frazzled, tired. The ship’s dead in the water with no immediate need for a pilot, but Garrus knows Joker hasn’t slept in days. Whenever he’s not helping the bridge crew repair the navigation systems, he’s in the AI core with the engineers. Donnelly’s told him more than once that Joker is doing more harm than good malingering while he and Daniels are trying to work, but nobody has the heart to tell him to leave.

 

“What is it?”

 

“Traynor’s got the QEC back up and running for the moment, and Kaidan’s going to try sending an update along to Hackett. He was looking for you, wanted to see if you could join him.”

 

Command of the Normandy has defaulted to Kaidan, as the ranking Alliance soldier onboard, but nobody’s doing much commanding at the moment. The damage to the ship is manageable, and the crew is extremely capable. Here on this sleepy garden planet there are no Reapers, no battles, no war. Actually, more often than not, once the day’s work is done there’s nothing but him, Kaidan, James, and a shit ton of alcohol.

 

Soldiers know that grief is always easier to manage when you’re blind drunk.

 

\---

 

During the day, he throws himself into work. He and Kaidan work together a lot – usually running recon on the planet's surface, scouting for possible short-term sources of food and resources, since three weeks planetside have put quite a dent in the Normandy's supplies. They make a good team.

 

He calibrates the guns, more out of habit than anything else. It lets him stop thinking for a while

 

By the time he makes it up to what had been the war room, Hackett's voice over the QEC is even more choppy than usual.

 

 _"We've been receiving...asualty reports...Citadel...and Hammer forces."_ The holo and audio are both buggy as all hell, and Traynor's expression as she apologizes to Kaidan about it is one of supreme frustration.

 

Hackett's sandpapery voice cuts through the interference one more time. _"We know now...Shepard....dead."_

 

Garrus' heart stops.

 

The expression on Kaidan's face barely changes, but Garrus has known him long enough to recognize despair when he sees it. "Sir? We know for sure, now?" Traynor curses at her console. "Admiral?"

 

It's no use. Hackett's gone.

 

Garrus knew they'd all been hoping, praying that she'd do it again – that this would be the Sovereign and the Collectors all over again, that the smoke would clear and she'd be standing in the ashes. Even he'd been hoping, against his instinct, against that _look_ he'd seen in her eyes.

 

They can't hope anymore.

 

\---

 

Kaidan announces it to the crew later in the afternoon, in a somber sort of ceremony that casts a pall over the rush of victory that had spurring everyone on. It says a lot about the loyalty of Shepard's crew that there's hardly a dry eye in the place. Traynor in particular is a mess, and if the visible fog forming on the inside of her mask is any indication, Tali isn't doing much better. Joker looks even more broken than usual.

 

Garrus just feels...numb.

 

That night, they have what Allers calls a "Bekenstein wake." They completely empty the bar in the officers' lounge, and the crew packs into Deck Three for a ridiculously loud gathering that feels more like a celebration than a funeral.

 

He thinks Shepard would probably like that.

 

By the end of the night Allers is leading half the bridge crew in a rousing chorus of something James calls an "Irish drinking song", and most everyone is at least halfway to drunk. In a memorial custom that humans and turians seem to have in common, they spend the better part of the evening trading stories about Shepard – most of which don't have to be inflated in the slightest to be impressive, but still manage to get more and more outrageous as the night goes on.

 

Liara, though, pulls him away from the group just as Joker starts to deliver a rather embellished version of what was actually a fairly routine retrieval mission – "so then Shepard says to the merc: _'I don't care where you go, but you sure as fuck can't stay here–'_ , and the guy _ran_ , just took off like a bat out of hell–"

 

Liara hasn't been drinking as much as the rest of them. Her eyes are clear and sad as she presses a long, thin piece of metal into his hand. "For the wall." she says quietly. "It seemed appropriate."

 

He mumbles something that might have been a thank you, and Liara nods, in that understanding way of hers, before making her way back to the raucous din of the wake.

 

He goes to the elevator instead. All of a sudden, the noise and the laughter seem _wrong_ , oppressive, too much to handle, and he's punching in a new destination on the console as fast he can–

 

And then he's on Deck One, and he's looking at her door. Their door, really. He's spent as much time there as she has – had – over the last few weeks. If he were sober, he'd stay far, far away, but it's about five drinks too late for that.

 

Inside, it's the same as it's always been. The soft bubbling hum of Shepard's aquarium – in his opinion, one of her stranger hobbies – is as constant as ever. The bed is neat, made with military precision, though the table is covered in Shepard's usual mess: casualty reports, engineering briefs, tactical analyses from Hackett and relevant comm data from Traynor.

 

Their wine glasses, from the night before Cronos Station.

 

The bed really isn't designed for turian comfort, but it's familiar, and it smells like her. He's asleep inside of two minutes, still clutching the plaque with _Commander Shepard_ etched across it.

 

That night, he doesn't dream about her.

 

\---

 

Tali finds him there, the next morning. He's more than grateful for the combination of understanding silence and dextro-friendly hangover cure that comes with her, and makes no argument when she leads him back down to Deck Three. There's a group of familiar faces huddled around the memorial wall, looking expectantly at him as he steps out of the elevator. Even Javik is there.

 

They've been waiting for Garrus – for the piece of metal he's still holding on to.

 

He notices that they've already added Anderson's name to the wall. Hackett's update last week brought the news that his body had been recovered from the Citadel.

 

There's a space underneath Anderson's name that's just the right size for the piece of metal in his hands. Despite its small size, the plaque feels heavy. He knows that she belongs there, on the wall with all this war's other heroes – with Mordin and Thane, with Legion and Anderson and Ash. As far as he's concerned, there is no one who's sacrificed more.

 

But he can't do it.

 

Two days later, the bulk of the repairs are complete and they head back towards Earth. His head still hurts, and the plaque is still sitting on his desk in the main battery.

 

He carves her name into his visor instead – _Shepard_ , right over the spot that had once read _Sidonis_.

 

\---

 

They dock planetside once they get back to Earth – there are reports to be made, supplies to restock, more thorough repairs to be done. Adams and the other engineers are adamant that there has to be a way to get EDI back online, but they can't do anything without access to Alliance resources.

 

Of course, the Alliance really isn't at full strength right now. No one is.

 

The war is over – and _won_ – but London is still the smoking ruin that it was a few weeks ago. Only now, the landscape is littered with Reaper corpses.

 

They're a sight to behold, really – massive, hulking shells of metal and machinery. "Dead gods", that Cerberus scientist had called them once. It's not true, but the thought makes sense. Even some of the smaller ones run the length of a dozen city blocks, and they still look...eerie. Like they might come back to life any second, rise back up and start the war all over again. The Alliance is trying to keep people away from them, for the most part – indoctrination is still a concern, since nobody is really sure what _happened_ to the Reapers, and the only person who might know is – well.

 

He's supposed to be reporting to the remainder of the Hierarchy still stationed on Earth. In fact, Victus had contacted him personally, to ask that he meet with him at their base of operations in London. He really has no clue what to expect from that – no clue what they'll expect from _him_ , now. The war is over, and Garrus doesn't know where to go or what to do.

 

It's three years ago all over again. Shepard is gone, and Garrus is lost without her.

 

Cortez, who graciously offered to give him a ride into the city center from the docks, sets the shuttle down in the courtyard of what once might have been an office plaza. It's been repurposed as an Alliance command center, though there's clearly still other military presences on the ground – he can see turians, krogan, asari, even salarians milling about. Just as Garrus spots a krogan that he thinks might be Grunt, a throaty shout cuts across the clearing, brash and familiar. _“Garrus!”_

 

The shout's coming from the other edge of the courtyard. It’s Jack, looking frighteningly intense, as per usual. However, the effect is slightly mitigated by the gaggle of human teenagers huddled around her like ducklings. Her students – Garrus vaguely recognizes a few of them, from Grissom.

 

Jack jogs across the courtyard and promptly punches him in the arm. He figures it's the closest thing he'll get to a hello from her.

 

“Jack. How wonderful to see you again.” It is sort of wonderful, actually. He's always liked Jack, despite her tendency towards excessive violence and frequent profanity; they always worked well together, though he's not sure how much of that was due to Shepard's influence.

 

It's good to see her alive. It makes victory feel more... _real_ , somehow.  

 

“I can’t believe you fucking made it, Garrus.” Her grin is feral but infectious; Garrus can’t help cracking a smile to match the one on Jack’s face. "Not that you still don't look like varren shit, but hell, you're breathing."

 

He laughs, despite himself. “If a rocket to the face wasn’t going to kill me, a couple of Reapers sure as hell weren't.”

 

“So did you go see her yet?” Jack blows an errant strand of hair away from her face, and crosses her arms across her chest. "It sure took you long enough, lover boy. 'I was stranded on an extrasolar planet' is only an excuse for so long, you know."

 

Something jumps inside him. Not hope, not quite, but it’s close. “See who?”

 

Jack looks shocked. It's not an expression that looks at home on her face. “Wait, you haven’t heard?”

 

Garrus shakes his head. The thing he doesn't want to call hope is leaping, dancing, welling up inside him and overflowing as he manages to stammer out “Heard _what_?”

 

Jack's jaw visibly drops. “Shit, Vakarian, no wonder you look like hell. Shepard’s fucking  _alive._ ”

 

\---

 

The shuttle ride to the hospital is the longest fifteen minutes of Garrus’ life. Longer than the first time he’d lost Shepard, back when he’d still been sitting behind a desk at C-Sec, staring dumbly at the Citadel NewsNet report that proclaimed _COMMANDER SHEPARD DEAD._ Longer than the sprint they’d made out of the Collector base, just barely outpacing a flurry of husks and drones  all the way back to the Normandy and safety. Longer than the exhilarating, terrifying stand-off against the Reaper on Tuchanka, dodging brutes and flying rocks as Shepard darted across the battlefield, trying to call Kalros from the deep.

 

Longer than the Normandy’s trip out of Earth’s atmosphere only a few weeks ago, when Tali had tried in vain to pry him away from the shuttle bay doors as he bled out all over the cargo bay floor.

 

There’s a woman sitting on the bench in the hallway. Garrus isn’t great at gauging human ages, but she looks…middle-aged, maybe? Younger than Hackett, older than Shepard. She’s tall and dark-skinned, wearing the off-duty blues of an Alliance officer.

 

There’s a distinct resemblance between her and…Shepard.

 

Shepard’s mother. The rear admiral. He can’t remember her first name, though he knows that Shepard has mentioned it before, on the occasion that family has come up.

 

“And who might you be?”

 

Garrus clears his throat. “Er– Vakarian. Garrus Vakarian, ma’am.”   

 

She stands, turns to look at him. “Garrus Vakarian. I’ve heard of you.”

 

“She’s–”

 

“Just asleep.” Hannah’s voice is soft, but sure. “She was awake, earlier, but the doctors say rest is important. There was a lot of internal bleeding, a lot of burns.” She closes her eyes; it’s a pained expression.

 

“But…she’ll be all right?”

 

"Yes." The woman's mouth quirks up in a tense sort of smile. 

 

"Yes, she will." 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Twenty-four hours later, Shepard still hasn't woken up. He's never hated hospital chairs so much.

Rear Admiral Shepard - who insists that Garrus just call her Hannah - flits in and out of the room. She's part of the team coordinating relief efforts in the greater London area, and duty calls, though it's clear she doesn't want to be anywhere except next to Garrus, in the chair by her daughter's bed. 

Nearly everyone from the Normandy has come by, in the interim. Kaidan and James are the first of a motley parade of Alliance personnel who tromp in and out the hospital all day long. Liara and Tali bring him food and sit with him for hours, and the excitement between the three of them is palpable, an almost physical sense of hope that makes the dim little hospital room seem brighter. Miranda ducks in once, very quickly, to confer with Shepard's doctors and give him a hesitant, awkward hug. Jack, to his eternal gratitude, brings alcohol and cards, blatantly ignoring the sour looks the doctor and nurses give her when they wander in and out of the room. 

In the twenty-fifth hour he's on the fuzzy edge of sleep, slumped uncomfortably in the damn hospital chair, when he hears a raspy voice say "Garrus?"

He sits up like a shot, any hope of sleep discarded immediately. The voice is cracked and hoarse with disuse but it's still _hers_ , and it's like Omega all over again, hearing her come up behind him and ask, unknowing, _"Archangel?"_

"Shepard." He's up and out of the chair, leaning over her bed, running battlefield vitals checks out of habit, even though she's fine and safe and hooked up to half a dozen different machines. 

"I'm..." She trails off, blinks experimentally, assessing the room. "Alive? Thought I must have dreamed that. There's no way-" 

"You're alive, Shepard." He shakes his head. "Spirits only know _how_ , but you are."

She tries to sit up in bed and winces, hissing with pain. "I must be alive. Being dead would hurt less, I think." Turning to face him as much as she can, she asks "What happened? To...everything? Everyone?"

"We won, Shepard. It's done." That sense of wonder is bubbling up inside him again, the one that sounds like Jack shouting _I can't believe we fucking won._ "I'm fine. The Normandy's fine. We're almost all of us - fine." 

Shepard's smile is weak, but genuine, as she mutters "My goddamn fish better still be _fine_ ", and it's so very _her_ that he can't do anything except throw his head back and laugh, because he's alive, and she's alive, and even the goddamn fish are alive, and for once is his life it really is all _fine._

\---

The doctors give it three weeks before Shepard will be recovered enough to leave the hospital. In the meantime, she's bored and restless and absolutely hating being in bed. So Garrus does the reasonable thing, and steals a wheelchair so that they can sneak out from under the doctors' watchful eyes for a while. 

The hospital is only half-standing, really. It clearly used to have three wings, but there's just two now, and one of them is badly damaged by all the fighting that London has seen. He parks Shepard's wheelchair in the half-collapsed husk of a waiting room, somewhere in the burned-out shell that used to be the west wing. There are two crumbling walls, a few twisted metal chairs, and a view of all of London from where the outward-facing walls used to be - a charred corpse being resurrected, coming slowly back to life. 

It's cold and damp today, raining just a bit; the sky here seems to constantly vacillate between clear, brilliant blue and and cloudy, drizzling grey. Shepard tells him that's normal for this part of Earth. They sit in silence for a little while, just looking - wondering really, still trying to puzzle out how it is that they're here. 

"What do we do now?" he asks.

Shepard just grins at him - that wry little smile that means _there's no Shepard without Vakarian_ , the one he's seen through sniper scopes and across battlefields drenched in blood but most of all, next to him in bed - and says "Whatever the fuck we want."

\---

It isn't _all_ fine in the end. That's how he knows it's real, though.

There are a lot of goddamn funerals. Garrus starts losing count after the twentieth. 

Anderson's is the first one they go to together. Shepard's still in a wheelchair, two weeks away from being released from the hospital properly. The doctors hadn't wanted to let her go, but she'd just growled out an _"excuse me?"_ in that tone of hers that brooked no argument, and nobody had tried to press the issue. 

It's not the first funeral he's been to since the war ended, but it is the first human one. He feels a little out of place, though in actuality the customs aren't too different from turian ones. The religious aspects are all nonsensical-sounding, but in his experience that's true of most religions, no matter what species they come from. Shepard sits next to him in her Alliance dress blues, back ramrod straight even in her wheelchair as she stares directly ahead and absolutely does not cry. 

When the service is over and the pallbearers - Kaidan and James among them - lead the coffin out, an Alliance marine Garrus doesn't know comes over with an armful of neatly folded blue fabric. Shepard seems wary, gone unusually still next to him.

The marine is also in her dress blues; she looks pressed and perfect and composed. She takes the bit of fabric out from under her arm and presents it to Shepard with both hands. "For you, Commander." 

"I can't-" Shepard looks a little shell-shocked. It doesn't look right on her. "His family-"

"Admiral Anderson didn't have any surviving family, ma'am." The younger woman looks a little uncomfortable, but her tone is firm. "Admiral Hackett assured me that he would have wanted this to go to you." Again, she offers what Garrus can see now must be a flag, folded tight and neat into a compact triangle. Shepard takes it with shaky hands, and the younger marine salutes, then turns on her heel to follow the funeral procession. 

He doesn't understand the custom or the significance, but he wraps his arms around Shepard as she cries for the first time since waking up, and she seems to appreciate that. 

\---

The universe holds on. Worlds keep on spinning. The royalties from the vids are, as expected, astronomical. 

They retire and get a place in Fiji. It's warm and tropical and horrendously boring, after a week or so. They buy a ship instead. It's not the Normandy, but they can't have the Normandy, and honestly Garrus isn't sure he'd want it if they could. He's walked back onto the ship a handful of times since the war ended, and it always feels a little like jumping back in time, like tempting fate in the worst possible way. 

They fight about what to name the ship, which is just ridiculous. Shepard refuses to take the idea seriously, and keeps suggesting ridiculous names like "Apple" and "Fruitcake." They never do agree on a name, but they keep the ship, and in it they go everywhere, including a lot of warm and tropical places, which they find are much less boring when you aren't committed to staying there indefinitely. 

They watch the galaxy put itself back together. They see Tali and the quarians restore the geth and then Rannoch, and watch the krogan raise cities from the ruined plains of Tuchanka. They chase down pirates in the Terminus Systems and help Jack put Grissom back on its feet. They sneak back to the top of the Presidium and get caught, this time. They run and fight and fuck and live like there's no tomorrow, because there _is_ , now, and they're drunk on it. 

But they get older, and running gets harder. Garrus never does find out what a turian-human baby looks like. He does, however, find out what a human baby looks like - pink, squishy, and entirely too breakable, in his opinion. Shepard finds out what a turian baby looks like. He finds out that Hannah Shepard is a formidable woman, a doting grandmother, and a slightly terrifying mother-in-law. Shepard meets his father, and the stare-down lasts seven minutes before either of them cracks. 

Home becomes everywhere and nowhere all at once. Home is Shepard and space, and the cabin on the ship, equal parts messy and neat, always lit by the soft blue glow of the aquarium - new cabin, same fish. Home is solid ground, the house in Fiji, where there are fewer guns, more toys, and more young, shrieking voices. Sometimes home is still on the battlefield; they are still soldiers in the end, and sometimes life still comes down to him and Shepard, blood and bullets, rifle and scope. 

It's never perfect. They have too many scars between them for that. But it's real and it's hard-won, and it's worth every bruise and broken bone, every scream and dying gasp, because every day feels like victory.

**Author's Note:**

> Like Not In Your Favor, this was originally written in response to a prompt at the mass effect kink meme a long, long time ago. Life prevented its completion, a sad circumstance that I hope to remedy now.


End file.
